Calling Mr. Nelson Pugh ✔️

*** REPEAT ***

    Blackness came. I could fight no more. I slid to the floor as the hotel room door burst open. I paid no attention as the hotel personnel barged in. What they thought when they saw me collapsed on the floor, hand broken, lip nearly severed, a phone clenched to my ear, I cannot say.

In that instant I could imagine only one thing: the scene unfolding nearly two hundred miles away. The hotel room was no more. My home had become absolute, my complete focus. I could hear the sirens descending upon the house, fading to shrill bursts as an army of emergency vehicles flooded into the yard. Inside a madman knelt over my family, delighting in the end of a game made just for him. I could see him cleaning his knife, his task done, and as I imagined him rising from his knees and standing over my daughters, I saw his lips part in a smile, an innocent childlike smile. Then he left, slipping away under the cover of darkness.

That same darkness enveloped me as I lost consciousness. Yet that smile never left. I see it even now, every time I close my eyes, and on every stranger's face. That smile will never leave me, imagined though it may be. I cannot forget it, those shining teeth, nor the delight in that voice. They, the smile and the calm, pleased whisperings of a madman, are my family now. Until death...